Bush Approval: Newsweek at 28%, Trend at 33.2%

A Newsweek poll taken 5/2-3/07 finds President Bush's approval rating fallen to 28%, with disapproval at 64%. This is a new all time low for Newsweek polling on Bush and ties the lowest readings of Harris polls (taken 4/20-23/07) and an older CBS poll taken 1/18-21/07. No poll has found a lower approval reading for the President.

With the addition of this Newsweek poll, my trend estimate stands at 33.2%, also an all time low.

Before concluding that Bush's approval has crashed, however, the Newsweek poll should be compared to the recent trend and to other recent polls. The last six polls have registered approval at 35, 28, 35, 32, 35 and 28. So the last six readings are three at 35, one at 32 and two at 28, a seven point range.

In the figure below, the Newsweek poll is clearly well below the current trend estimate, and more importantly, is below the typical Newsweek poll, which is normally about 2-3 points below the trend. The current poll is 5.2 points below trend.
























This means that Newsweek is a bit atypically low, compared to both other polls and to its own normal trend.

A check of the outlier analysis shows that Newsweek, like Harris 10 days earlier, is in fact an outlier when compared to the variation around the trend estimate for all polls.
























The Newsweek and Harris polls are exerting a significant pull on the trend estimate, even when balanced against the three recent polls at 35%. The current small downward slope in the trend estimate is due to the addition of Newsweek. It was flat prior to adding the new poll.

The uncertainty of the trend estimate can be seen in the gray area in the plot below. While the trend is moving a bit down since early 2007, it has remained well within the gray region, suggesting we have no reliable evidence that approval is moving either way. Since January the approval trend has sometimes moved up slightly and sometimes down slightly, but has never sustained either trend long enough to move out of the uncertainty band. The current downward slope may again be reversed with new polling (or not-- let the data speak.)
























The sensitivity analysis below shows how the last 20 trend estimates have moved around as each new poll has been added. the substantial effect of the new Newsweek poll is apparent in the gap between the current estimate and the previous cluster of estimates between 34% and 35%.

























The bottom line is that the evidence for a new decline in approval remains quite mixed, with two polls claiming a rather dramatic drop in approval, while several others suggest continued stability around 32%-35%. Given the outlier analysis and the fact that the Newsweek poll is clearly below that poll's own trend, we must still wait before concluding that approval has taken a sharp turn down. The evidence remains in favor of rough stability around 34%, though the trend estimate now stands a little below that, in deference to Newsweek's evidence.

Right Direction or Wrong Track

Updated 11/6/07
























Right direction or wrong track trend. (Click image once or twice for full resolution)

This post is updated in place. Come to this page for the latest tracking of the right direction/wrong track series. The index in the right column provides a direct link from the thumbnail to this page.

Congressional Approval

Updated 11/6/2007













Congressional approval since 1990. Click once or twice on the image for a full size view.

This post is updated in place so you can always come here for the latest data on Congressional approval. The index in the right column provides a direct link from the thumbnail to this page.

Pres08: A closer look at primary trends

Who is up and who is down in recent presidential nomination polling? What are the current trends? The question is not as trivial to answer as it might seem. If we look at different polls, we can find some bouncing up while others bounce down. Commentators often reach different conclusions because the are comparing different polls. None of the recent polls have the order of finish significantly different--- all have Clinton and Giuliani in first place and Obama and McCain in second, with Edwards and Gore together and Romney, Fred Thompson and Gingrich mixed together. But the gaps between the candidates, and who has moved up or down since the last poll varies quite a bit across polls.

The goal of my kind of analysis is to avoid the trap of focusing on only one or a couple of polls. My approach is quite skeptical of the evidence provided by any single poll, but quite confident in the information from all the polls taken together. The problem is how to combine the polls to get a good estimate of what is "really" happening, and not to be deceived by the random variation from poll to poll. So let's see how the presidential nomination races are shaping up when we take all the polls seriously.

Regular readers know that my "standard" trend estimate is the blue line in the charts. This is a line that is calculated to go through the "middle" of the data, with an average error of zero, meaning the points below the line balance the points above the line. "Old Blue", as I affectionately call this line, is deliberately conservative in the sense that it takes quite a bit of new polling data to convince it to change trend direction. The reason for this is that we know there is quite a bit of noise in the polls (just look at the spread of points around the line!) so when a new poll comes in high it might mean an upturn in support, but it is just as likely that it simply reflects random noise and the next poll is as likely to come in low. If we allow the trend estimate to chase each new data point too much, we'll just plot random noise rather than the best estimate of the trend in support. Experience with these and other data (such as presidential approval) has shown that Old Blue is seldom misled about new trends, though it does take a while (about a dozen polls) to notice changing trends.

While it is good to avoid responding too much to a single poll, it is also true that Old Blue may stick to a trend longer than it should. A more sensitive estimator would notice a change in direction quicker, and would jump on the new trend while it is still news-- and before others notice it. "Ready Red" is the answer to this. The red line in the charts is twice as sensitive to change as is Old Blue. As a result it will pick up changes in momentum more quickly, letting us spot new trends early. Unfortunately, it will also sometimes be misled and will think it sees a new trend when in fact none exists-- just a few polls that happen to be "down" or "up" but which really don't represent any significant shift.

Of course you can adjust the sensitivity of the trend estimator to anything between Ready Red and Old Blue (or outside them too, for that matter) to see how much difference the sensitivity makes. There is no perfect way to choose a "best" estimator. I've settled on the more conservative Blue estimator as my standard because I find the hasty red estimator has often jumped the gun on presidential approval trends, which more data has subsequently shown were not really changing. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't examine the more sensitive trend estimate-- it tells us a lot, even if we have to be a bit cautious. (I'd rather be right but slow. Others prefer to be quick, and adjust to mistakes as necessary. Both approaches have their virtues.)

The chart above shows the data and the trend estimates for the top Democrats. Republicans are in the chart below. In addition to Old Blue and Ready Red, there are a number of gray trend lines (81 in each figure). These show the estimated trends for levels of sensitivity from quite a bit MORE sensitive than Ready Red to MORE conservative than Old Blue. If you can see the gray lines, this means that at least for some levels of sensitivity the estimated trend differs from either Blue or Red. If you cannot see the gray lines, or only barely, this means that the estimated trend hardly depends on the amount of sensitivity and the many gray lines all lie under Red or Blue in the plot, and so are covered up. This typically happens when there is a smooth, steady trend with no bends in it.

So enough statistics, let's look at the politics.

In the Democratic race, the Old Blue estimator says that Clinton has been flat since January, after a bit of decline in 2006 and a slight rebound late in 2006. Not much action.

But if we look at Ready Red, the Clinton campaign appears to be falling off in recent polling, declining by about 3 or 4 points since her peak in January. That isn't a large drop, but it does suggest that the stable picture of Old Blue may be masking some short term decay.

The Obama campaign is similarly interesting in comparison of the two trend estimates. Old Blue sees a sharp rise in early 2007 with a slower but still upward trend recently. Red sees more of a plateau in recent polls, with some indecisive and quite small up and down bounces. If I believe Red, I say Obama has stalled. If I believe Blue, I say he has slowed but is still moving up a little. (If I'm really crazy, I say the last little uptick in Ready Red suggests Obama is about to move up again, but that would be giving an awful lot of weight to the very last polls on a sensitive estimator. I'm not that crazy.)

The two trends are in pretty close agreement for Gore, but with Red suggesting a slight downturn at the very end, while Blue says the trend remains up a bit. Again, the difference is driven by only the polls at the very end and I'm not willing to bet much on them.

The Edwards campaign could take heart in Red's somewhat higher rate of climb in support compared to Blue. Both agree Edwards has been moving up, but Red sees the upturn as sharper and ending at a higher level. The best that can be said here for Red is that this trend has been supported by more polls than is the last little change of Obama or for Gore.

As for the numbers, the estimates are not far apart regardless of which estimator we pick.

Clinton: 35.7 (Blue)/34.1 (Red)
Obama: 24.0/25.1
Edwards: 15.1/16.6
Gore: 15.5/14.0

On the Republican side, Giuliani has enjoyed a long and sustained rise based on Old Blue, but suffers a recent downturn if Ready Red is to be believed. If the sensitive estimate is right, there has been over a five point decline in Giuliani's recent standing since early February. If Blue is right, then don't be hasty and Giuliani has continued to gain, though at a slower rate than in late 2006.
























Red and Blue agree that 2007 has been a bad time for the McCain campaign. After a flat 2006, McCain has dropped over five points in both estimators. Sensitive Red thinks there may be a chance of a recent reversal of that slide, but Old Blue remains entirely unconvinced that McCain's fortunes are improving.

Blue and Red also agree that Gingrich has suffered a bit of a recent decline (more or less coinciding with talk of a possible Fred Thompson candidacy.) This is a nice example of both estimators reaching the same conclusion, even with late trends. Red sees Gingrich slightly worse off than does Blue, but the difference is slight.

Likewise, both estimators are largely in agreement that Romney has sustained his tortoise-like slow but steady increase. Despite some campaign gaffes, both trends remain up, with Red being a little more bullish than Blue.

Fred Thompson lacks enough data to provide a fair assessment of the estimators, but who can ignore him at this point. The only rational approach would be to be conservative in the face of very limited data for a trend estimate. By that account, Old Blue says the sudden possibility of a Thompson campaign has generated 10 points of support, but with no evidence of a trend either way since polling on Thompson began. The Red estimator jumps around-- there just isn't enough data for a sensitive trend.

The current estimates for each trend are:

Giuliani: 34.8 (Blue)/30.4 (Red)
McCain: 19.4/21.3
Romney: 9.4/10.5
FThompson: 9.9/10.1
Gingrich: 8.3/7.3


We can check the sensitivity of these estimates to the amount of smoothing used to estimate the trend. Here I use 81 separate estimates of the current standing of each candidate, with the smoothing ranging from MORE sensitive than Red to MORE conservative than Blue. This is a wider range than I think anyone would reasonably want. The most sensitive end produces trends that jump around way more than anyone could believe, and the most conservative fit is basically just a straight line with hardly any change at all. But somewhere between these limits of silliness are a range of reasonable estimates. If the bottom line estimate for a candidate is pretty compact, then the amount of smoothing doesn't matter. If the estimates are spread out, then we at least know that sensitivity matters and we should be cautious. The summary of the data are presented below.



















The top half of the plot shows that the estimates for most candidates are in fact within a fairly small range regardless of how sensitive the estimates happen to be. Gore and Edwards are quite close, with some overlapping estimates of support. But Obama and Clinton are clearly distinct from each other and from Edwards and Gore. Similarly, Gingrich, Thompson and Romney show similar estimates and considerable overlap, while McCain is clearly above them and Giuliani clearly ahead of McCain.

Giuliani stands out among all the candidates in demonstrating more dependence on the sensitivity of the estimator. His box is more spread out than those of other candidates in the top half of the plot. In the lower half, which plots the distribution of all the estimates, Giuliani shows a bi-modal distribution. If we pick a more sensitive estimator, Giuliani support falls in the lower "hump" of the distribution, while less sensitive estimators suggest a stronger standing, producing the right hump. This difference is not trivial-- the more sensitive estimator says Giuliani is at about 30% support, while the more conservative one says 35%. No other candidate shows as large a discrepancy. This is due to the rather substantial downturn that Ready Red sees in Giuliani's polling over the last three months, but which Old Blue is still reluctant to accept. Which is right? Well, that's the whole point here: If you are a bit more daring, believe what Red has to say. If you like to buy municipal bonds, go with Blue.

One final way to look at sensitivity is to plot the estimated support for each candidate against the degree of smoothing used for each of the 81 estimates. Low values are less smoothing and more sensitive trends, while high degree of smoothing are more conservative and less sensitive.
























The good news from my point of view is that most of the lines do not demonstrate a strong relationship between amount of smoothing and the estimated support. While there is a little movement, it isn't sharp for anyone. The Giuliani line is the one showing the greatest variation across degree of smoothing, as I already noted. The upshot of this is that while I constantly worry about how much my estimates are affected by my preference for Old Blue, the data show that mostly it doesn't matter a lot, and certainly not within a reasonable range of smoothing. (In the plot above, Old Blue is a degree of smoothing of .7, while Ready Red is at .35.)

It is good to compare Old Blue and Ready Red-- both offer helpful insights into the nomination race. Your acceptance of the risk of being too slow to recognize change versus the risk of chasing phantom blips should help you decide which to give more credence.

Bush Approval: Harris at 28%, Trend at 34.1%

After a flurry of new polls in the last 24 hours, a new Harris poll taken 4/20-23/07 finds approval at 28%, disapproval at 70%. With this addition, the estimated approval trend stands at 34.1%.

The Harris result is a good deal below the estimated trend, and below other recent polls. In part this reflects a typical Harris "house effect". With it's atypical four point question format ("Excellent, good, fair or poor" rather than "approve or disapprove"), Harris' approval results are often a bit below that of other pollsters. The plot below, however, shows that this low result is not only due to house effects. The current poll is noticeably further below the trend estimate than are other recent Harris results.
























How far the new poll is from the trend is apparent in the next figure below, in which Harris clearly falls outside the 95% confidence interval for "normal" variability. While it is possible the new poll at 28% represents a sudden negative shift, this is quite a distance away from other contemporaneous results from CBS News, NBC/WSJ and Pew.
























In light of the outlier analysis, it seems likely that the new Harris poll does not represent a sudden shift in support for President Bush. It is more reasonable that our prior estimate of 34.7% is closer to the national mood, rather than the 34.1% resulting from inclusion of this poll. In either case, the overall picture of relatively little trend in the last 5 months holds. We have been in a period of approval moving up or down a point, but never establishing strong evidence for a trend. While it could change at any point, the post-2006 election period has so far held in rough equilibrium.

Bush Approval: Trend at 34.7%

We remain in a flat period. A one point improvement or a one point decline has been the story of the last five months. So far the President has managed to neither rally support nor to sink in public approval.

These data add recent polls by NBC/WSJ (2/4/20-23/07, 35% approve, 60% disapprove), Pew (4/18-22/07, 35%/57%) and CBS News (4/20-24/07, 32%, 61%).

With these new data, the trend estimate stands at 34.7%.

Approval of Vice-President Cheney

Today's little quote on Vice-President Cheney from Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) in the New York Times, "I’m not going to get into a name-calling match with somebody who has a 9 percent approval rating", was the second time in two weeks that a prominent Democratic Senator asserted that public support for the Vice-President is exceptionally low. On April 15, on Fox News Sunday, Senator Carl Levin (D-MI) said "Vice President Cheney has zero credibility. I don't think anybody more than 5 percent or 10 percent of the hardcore solid Republican base believes much that Vice President Cheney says. He has no credibility."

My colleague at Pollster.com, Mark Blumenthal, promptly set the current record straight with this post. Cheney's approval is running between 29% and 34% in the four most recent polls.

Normally I'd write either of these quotes off to hyperbole in a world rarely disciplined by details like data, but the two quotes in short order raises a more interesting question: do Democrats, even political professionals, systematically misperceive Cheney's standing in public opinion? It isn't that Cheney has a particularly positive public standing, but as the figure above shows, he in fact is only a few points lower in approval rating than is President Bush.

In the "paired-data" (meaning only polls that ask about both Bush and Cheney job approval) above, Bush approval is about 34% and Cheney approval is 32%-33%. Over the course of the entire administration, Cheney has consistently been a bit below the President in approval, more-so in the first term and less-so in the second term. This is partly an artifact of more people saying they "don't know" if they approve or disapprove of Cheney.
























The 2004 reelection campaign represented a change, with the gap in "don't know" rates narrowing from double to single digits. This reduced the extent to which approval of Cheney was affected by lack of knowledge or opinion crystallization. Still, there remains a persistent gap in those unable to give an opinion on Bush and Cheney's job performance, and this contributes somewhat to the Bush-Cheney approval gap, keeping Cheney's approval below that of Bush.

On the disapproval side, the story is a bit more interesting. Cheney suffered greater disapproval than Bush in the first term, despite the difference in "don't know" rates. The 2004 election and the early 2005 period represents the turning point, with Bush moving modestly ahead in disapproval, a lead he has consistently held since mid-2005.
























This disapproval difference is clearly not due to Cheney's greater obscurity-- he was more disapproved of when he was more unknown.

A couple of conclusions are clear. Cheney has consistently had a lower approval rate than Bush, but the margin since 2004 has not been large. A significant portion of this approval difference is attributable to the difference in "don't know" rates. As the latter shrunk, so the approval gap shrunk. Cheney was significantly more unpopular than Bush in the first term but that has reversed. Taken together, there is certainly no evidence that Cheney is significantly less popular than the President.

So why are Democrats so convinced that Cheney is substantially more unpopular than Bush, given the small actual differences? One possibility is the overwhelmingly negative views of Bush among Democrats (his approval rating among Democrats has been below 10% for months) means that Democrats move in a virtually completely homogeneous environment which gives them no chance to encounter other Democrats with a more positive view of Bush (and by extrapolation, Cheney-- I have no data on Cheney approval by party, but it is surely also below 10% among Democrats.) So when Sen. Reid says Cheney has a "9 percent approval rating" he might be reflecting the views of Democrats pretty accurately, even though he is wildly understating approval among the public as a whole.

And I don't discount the possibility that these comments were deliberate rhetorical exaggerations, and that both Sen. Levin and Sen. Reid are perfectly well aware of the data. Despite that caveat, the perception of Cheney in the Democratic blogosphere amply supports the notion that this perception that he is far less popular than Bush is in fact widespread and not just confined to these two Senators.

Congressional Approval Rises Only a Bit, Not a Lot

(Click the graphs once or twice for a full size view.)

A large number of media outlets and blogs ran this AP story on congressional approval. USAToday carried it this way:

AP Poll: Congress' approval hits high point

Public approval for Congress is at its highest level in a year as Democrats mark 100 days in power and step up their confrontation with President Bush over his handling of the Iraq War, the issue that overshadows all others.

. . .

The findings from an AP-Ipsos nationwide poll provide a snapshot of public sentiment in the days after the House and Senate triggered a series of veto threats from the president by passing separate bills that provide funds for the war, yet also call for the withdrawal of U.S. combat troops.

Overall approval for Congress is 40%. The survey shows Bush's approval ratings remain in the mid-30 percent range ...

Which is all well and good except the AP poll is quite high compared to other recent polls of congressional approval, including AP's previous polls.

Of the last six polls the three most recent have come in above the previous trend estimate of 30.8%: Gallup has it at 33% (up from their previous 28%), AP at 40% and the Hotline at 37%. (Gallup has done two of the last six, so appears twice in the figure below.) The effect of these new polls is to revise my estimate of congressional approval up to 33.1%. But that is still a good deal shy of the AP result at 40% and a bit south of Hotline at 37%.




























With the addition of the three new polls, what had looked like a pretty steady downturn in congressional approval since January now looks pretty flat. For the Democrats, that's a definite improvement, but it certainly isn't the large upturn that the AP story (and its reverberations in the blogosphere) have taken it to be.

Notice in the figure above for the AP, that AP polling has generally tracked quite well with my trend estimate of congressional approval. Only this most recent poll is well above the trend, with all other AP polls hugging the blue line pretty tightly. So AP doesn't routinely produce high congressional approval numbers, just this time.

As always, one poll should not dominate our interpretation of political dynamics. In this case, it is possible that something dramatic has suddenly boosted congressional approval, and AP (with the Hotline a couple of days earlier) was just lucky enough to be in the field right after it happened. We can offer reasons why this may or may not be the case, though I prefer to just wait for more data to settle the case one way or another.

But what we can do is look at how the trend estimator varies, and how the polling varies around that trend. The plot below shows the blue trend line with a gray region representing the variation in that estimate from 30,000 "bootstrap" estimates. A bootstrap is a good way of estimating the variability of an estimator, especially as in this case when we don't wish to make strong assumptions about the statistical distribution of the variation. The gray region represents the range of estimates of congressional approval we might reasonably expect to see, given the randomness of the polls and of events that drive congressional approval. I've overlaid the actual poll results on top of this, in red, so it is clear how the estimator varies (the gray area) and how the polls vary (the red points) all around the estimated trend (the blue line).













So what do we see? Quite a bit of variation. Congressional approval is asked a good deal less often than is presidential approval, so with less data, the gray area is relatively wider than it is for presidential approval, especially early in the series when very few polls were available for the early 1990s. That's somewhat better now, and the range of the gray area is smaller now than at the beginning.

The other variation is the polls. They are distributed roughly equally above and below the trend line, and spread a little bit more than does the estimator's gray area.

And right at the end, you can see that the AP data point at 40% is at the extreme upper end of the range of plausible estimates.

This doesn't mean it is necessarily wrong, and it certainly doesn't mean the poll was flawed. ALL poll vary, and individual questions vary as well. It is perfectly normal to see this kind of range of variation, as looking at the spread of the other red data points clearly illustrates.

But before we write a headline about support for congress being at a new high point, it would be worth considering the evidence a bit more carefully. Judging from all the data we have in hand today, it would be rash to suggest that congressional approval is at 40%. A much more plausible estimate is where the trend estimator stands: 33.1%.

And that changes the interpretation of the story which plays on Congress at 40% vs Bush "in the mid-thirties". In fact, the best evidence as of tonight is that Bush is at 34.4% and Congress at 33.1%. Politically, that means neither has a clear edge in support over the other at the moment. (Caution: We should really look at approval of "the Democrats in Congress" if we want to directly address the question of which end of Pennsylvania Avenue enjoys more support in the coming struggle over the Iraq funding bill. And other questions too!)

One final caution is that the trend estimator is sensitive to the most recent polls. So these three new polls pulled the estimate up enough that what had previously looked like some modest decline since January now looks to be pretty flat. Is it? The graph below shows how sensitive the estimator is to each of the last 20 polls.






















The results show that for much of the last 20 estimates, the trend has been moving down. That has only been arrested as the last three polls have been added. So any conclusion about whether congressional approval is declining, steady, or increasing, rests on the thin reed of just three polls. Before we reach bold conclusions about the trajectory of public support for Congress, we should take some strong caution pills, and look at each new poll with some healthy skepticism until it gives us reason to trust it.

Pres08: National Support For McCain Still Slips

The trend estimate of support for Senator John McCain for the Republican nomination continues to slip downward. This trend has been apparent for a while, but shows signs of accelerating rather than stabilizing. The new Gallup Poll taken 4/2-5/07 has McCain at 16%, and the Gallup release notes this is a decline from previous Gallup data. But the decline is more widespread than just a single poll by a single organization. Since January 1, Sen. McCain's support has been on a downward trajectory. This loss of popular support in national polls has come as Giuliani has moved steadily upward and other potential challengers (Gingrich and Romney) have seen modest, if steady, increases.

The finance performance of the McCain campaign raised questions about his support among significant Republican donors, but the continuing negative trend in popular support may prove more deadly. McCain is set to "re-launch" his campaign with a new round of speeches and appearances. The question is whether he can sell his support for the war (something Republicans should be receptive to) and his conservative record (generally strong) to an audience that despises his campaign finance reform bill and sees him as too much of a loose canon.

Were it not for campaign finance, which many conservatives hold bitterly against McCain, and perhaps his support for restrictions on interrogations, McCain should be able to appeal to Republicans, certainly more so than Giuliani. But so far little if anything seems to be working for McCain. If the relaunch fails, McCain's fall threatens to move Gingrinch into second place among Republicans nationally. (Or perhaps that should be Fred Thompson, at 10% in the new Gallup poll, but with too little polling yet for a trend estimate.)

Bush Approval: Gallup at 38%, Trend at 34.4%

A new USAToday/Gallup poll taken (4/2-5/07) finds approval at 38%, disapproval at 58%. With the addition of this datapoint the trend estimator stands at 34.4%.

The new Gallup poll is a good bit above the previous trend estimate of 33.8% and is exerting a noticeable pull on the trend, but the new poll is within the +/- 5 point confidence interval for polling around the trend estimate, so it does not qualify for outlier status. As any reader of these pages should know, there is considerable variability in polling, and Gallup's latest is clearly high but within that range.

Looking only at Gallup polls since the 2006 election, approval has averaged 35.2% in Gallup's readings. This has fluctuated between 32% and 38% with little discernible trend. The current reading then, is also consistent with the variability in Gallup's polling over the past five months.

While the trend estimate takes a twitch up with this new poll, the shift is well within the range of noise around the estimator. My estimate has suggested that approval has held relatively steady between 33% and 35% since 1/1/2007. Until several more polls join Gallup in the high 30s, the best bet remains between 33% and 35%.

Bush Approval: Two polls at 35%, Trend at 33.8%

The new Hotline poll, taken 3/29-4/1/07 finds approval at 35% and disapproval at 61%. The AP/Ipsos poll done 4/2-4/4/07 has approval at 35% and disapproval at 62%.

These move the approval trend estimate to 33.8%, well within the range of recent variation of the estimator.

There are still no recent outliers, so the dynamics appear unchanged since the last discussion of results here.

Congressional Job Approval, 1990-2007

(Click once or twice on the graphic for a full resolution view. It is big.)

The Democratic congress was swept into office due in part to the low approval of the old Republican congress. Initially approval of Congress improved but is now beginning to slide down a bit. With a confrontation on Iraq war funding looming, it is time to take a look at congressional approval.

As of polling completed 3/28/07, approval of Congress' handling of its job is at 30.8%, compared to 33.3% for President Bush. But Americans love to hate Congress even as we usually love our district's member of Congress. So how does the current 30.8% approval compare with the past?

Over the long haul, from 1990, current approval is rather low, though not at rock bottom. Congressional approval bottomed out in 1992 during the House banking scandal in which members were allowed to maintain negative balances in their accounts. While trivial in comparison to national policy issues, this scandal was a potent symbol of congressional privilege and members who had bounced checks were seriously affected in the 1992 elections. Of the 47 members who bounced over 100 checks, 55% (26) were gone from the 103rd Congress in 1993. Even among those with less than 100 bounces the turnover rate was 43% higher than among those with no check problems. (Data from Jacobson and Dimock, American Journal of Political Science, August 1994, pp 601-624.)

At the low point, my estimate of congressional approval fell to an almost unbelievable 17.5% on June 7, 1992.

Approval improved in 1993 and the first half of 1994, but stayed mostly in the 20s, breaking 30% briefly in early 1994. But this small improvement was followed by another substantial collapse during the fall campaign, to 23.8% by election day. By comparison, in 2006 congressional job approval was at 27.5% on election day.

Following the 1994 Republican revolution, approval improved significantly for the first half of 1995, topping 35% for the first time since early 1990. However, this improvement reached its limit as the Republican Congress confronted a Democratic president over budget decisions. With the confrontation and the eventual shutdown of the federal government, congressional job approval turned down to the high 20s again, bottoming out as the budget crisis was eventually resolved.

Congress then enjoyed two and a half years of improving public approval. Interestingly, this occurred despite a Democratic president whose popularity was also increasing during this time. Approval reached 50% in early 1998, and remained there until after the 1998 elections.

But impeachment was a mistake, at least from the perspective of approval of Congress, with approval dropping sharply by some 7 points during and immediately after the impeachment proceedings. Congress remained below 45% until once more improving to 50% approval during the 2000 election contest.

As with presidential approval, 9/11 produced a significant upturn in congressional approval, though this fell back to around 47% by the 2002 elections.

The start of the Iraq war saw a substantial increase in approval of President Bush, but there is no evidence of a similar rally for Congress in early 2003. From 2003 through the 2004 elections, approval slowly declined to about 40% before turning up slightly at the end of 2004.

That was the last good news for congressional approval under Republican control. The spring of 2005 saw a very sharp drop in approval, from 41% to 33% in the first half of the year, followed by a slower but steady decline until mid-2006. Approval finally bottomed out around April 2006, and held relatively steady through the election, ending at 27.5% on election day.

With the start of the 110th Congress in January, the Democrats enjoyed a modest, but nonetheless significant upturn in approval, to 32.6%.

Since then, the trend has been slowly but steadily downward, reaching the current 30.8% approval as of March 28th.
























Compared to 1994, the Democratic gain has been modest. Following the 1994 election, the new Republican Congress enjoyed an immediate upturn of over 7 points. The improvement peaked at 35.9% approval on March 30, 1995. The current Democratic gain was limited to 5.1%, and has since declined rather than continued to improve, as in early 1995.

And so we come to the first major confrontation of a president at 33.3% approval and a Congress at 30.8%. Given the results from 1995, a Congress should worry about confronting even an unpopular president. On the other hand, the budget battles of 1995 were quite different from the Iraq policy battles of 2007. President Bush seems to be betting that a cut off of funds, or even a temporary lapse of funding, will redound to his benefit. But recent polls have also found that more of the public support a withdrawal deadline than take the President's position. How this issue is shaped (starting a withdrawal versus cutting off the troops in the field) will have a significant effect on the outcome of the public debate. But it is a debate in which neither of the primary actors have a substantial advantage in public approval.

(I should note that ratings of "Democrats" or "Democratic leaders" in Congress are a bit above those of Congress as a whole, the variable of interest here. In the few polls that have asked about Democrats or Democratic leaders since the new Congress started, the approval ratings have mostly been in the low 40s, with one poll above 50. This is relevant to the debate over Iraq, and I will turn to this element of evaluation in a subsequent post.)

Bush Approval: Zogby at 32%, Trend at 33.3%

A slightly stale Zogby poll taken 3/22-26/07 has approval at 32% and disapproval at 67%. The poll released results for other items, but the approval item did not appear until 4/3 on Hotline. With this result added, the approval trend stands at 33.3%.

Zogby tends to run below the trend, though in this case by only a small amount.

See my earlier post on the newer Newsweek poll for a discussion which is not changed by this revision of the trend estimate.

Bush Approval: Newsweek at 33%, Trend at 33.5%

A Newsweek poll taken 3/28-29/07 finds approval at 33%, disapproval at 60%. With this addition the approval trend estimate now stands at 33.5%.

The Newsweek poll, which often comes in with a below trend house effect, is very close to trend, so has little impact on the estimate. We've now seen several polls in the 33%-34% approval range, plus one at 37%.

The trend estimate has remained between 33% and 35% approval over the last 20 polls. While there appears to be a consistent but small negative slope in approval since the November elections, the rate of change is small enough that it has been hard to distinguish from stable approval. Individual polls, with a margin of error around 5 points about the trend estimate, cannot hope to reliably detect such a small rate of change. Even the trend estimate, with an uncertainty of about +/- 2 points is hard pressed to unequivocally call the current period a downward trend, though the bootstrap plot shows a small downtrend is a pretty good bet.

It is interesting that approval has not suffered a sharp downturn in the aftermath of the November elections and the Democratic takeover of Congress. Rather, it appears that public dissatisfaction with President Bush largely spent itself in the elections. Since then, the new opposition between Republican President and Democratic Congress appears to have stabilized opinion of Bush's handling of his job. As we saw in yesterday's presidential comments on funding for Iraq, the Democratic Congress provides a target for Presidential rhetoric which was lacking when Republicans controlled the Congress. The struggle over the emergency funding bill will provide an interesting lesson in the relative strengths of President and Congress.

The residuals remain well behaved, so no recent polls are currently "outliers".